The client is a US multinational telecommunications leader and the third-largest provider of mobile services in the US.
The Challenge
To keep up with ever-evolving customer needs, the client needed to leverage cutting-edge technology and optimize costs. This required them to not only migrate home-grown applications to the cloud but optimize and modernize them to leverage cost benefits. The client chose Azure but the journey to the cloud was very challenging as the legacy applications were extremely complicated and built on a variety of open-source technologies.
The client wanted to automate all aspects of the migration process, including evaluation, migration and testing, to ensure that their journey to the cloud was fast and seamless, with minimum impact on business functions. The migration to the Azure platform was a challenge in itself, as more than 85% of consumer applications were non-Microsoft.
The Solution
Persistent helped the client to evaluate the apps and categorize them into five categories — optimize, modernize, replace, migrate to strategic DC and retire. The team devised a strategy to migrate 4,000+ in-scope applications in four years, with 1K to 1.5K applications per year.
Persistent executed the migration of applications in four stages — intake, scheduling, factory orchestration, and operationalization and built immutable infrastructure with a ‘replace and not repair’ strategy.
The team deployed infrastructure as code with fully automated CI / CD deployment pipeline. To reduce resource consumption and provide dynamic elasticity, Persistent optimized homegrown applications once they were migrated to the cloud.
The Outcome
The client cut operational costs by 80% and reduced the physical data center footprint by a significant margin. Over 150 reusable components were built, including identity management, PaaS, and security management components, to ensure cost optimization. In two years, over 3,500 apps, including ticketing system, financial system and media communication systems were migrated to the Azure cloud. The migration helped the client fulfill the commitment of $2 billion Azure consumption over seven years.
Technology Used
- Microsoft Azure
- Terraform
- Helm Chart
- Azure Packer
- Azure Monitor
- Azure Telemetry
- Azure DevOps
- Azure Runbooks
- Azure Key Vault
- Docker
- Azure Kubernetes Service
